What new e-reader or tablet are you going to buy?

Good e-Reader Research conducts surveys and polls every month and looks at major trends in digital publishing, e-books and the e-reader industry. The holiday season is almost upon us and many people are buying a new device for themselves or a gift for a loved one. We wanted to know what new e-reader or tablet that people intended on purchasing.

573 people participated in our two week poll that was available on Good e-Reader. 174 people, which represented 30% of the overall vote are going to be buying one of Amazons e-ink readers. This includes the Paperwhite, Voyage and entry level Basic models.

129 people exclaimed that they were going to purchase a Kobo e-reader. The Canadian based company has released two new models this year, the Kobo Glo HD and Kobo Touch 2.0. One of the great things about buying an e-reader from Kobo is that they tend to support their older e-readers for many years, whereas Amazon and B&N tend to forget about them.

Amazon and Kobo were the runaway success stories in our latest poll, but things became really close when it came to other devices. 7.85% of our audience said they were going to buy an Android tablet and 7.33% were going to buy one of the new Amazon Fire tablets. 6.98% are going to buy an iPad or an iPad Mini, while 6.81% were going to buy an e-reader from a European company such as Icarus, Onyx or Pocketbook.

What is most surprising amount our new data report was the strong apathy towards Barnes and Noble. 30 people said they were going to buy the Nook Glowlight Plus and a paltry 11 said they were going to buy one of the new Samsung Galaxy for Nook tablets. I always knew that Barnes and Noble was losing customers due to a series of missteps in recent years and have been unable to win them back.

Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past ten years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and Verge.

Waiting for the Kobo Aura H20 2 since Amazon refuses to release a larger eReader. Hopefully Kobo changes the horrible book format on a new software update. The only thing that has held me back is the poor indentation on Kobo eReaders with the inch or so wasted space on the top and bottom.

AG

I think you guys should advertise the glowlight plus more. I don’t want Barnes and noble to die… Plus the glowlight plus is really good. Mine doesn’t experience any of the lagging that the one you tested does. It also now supports Adobe digital additions so you can download library ebooks now. Back with the simple touch with glowlight you guys seemed to love nook and now you guys seem so against it. No it’s not as good as the kindle voyage but it’s the best barnesandnoble has ever made, the light is very even, and it’s almost as good as the paperwhite (better in some aspects, only worse because the ppw has some more features and better pdf functionality). Just so you know I own the kindle voyage and glowlight plus and had the original glowlight which was terrible in comparison.

Hm, I don’t have much wasted space when I set margins to zero on my Kobo Aura H2O… I think I also disabled some footer option which was too wasteful (too bad Kobo doesn’t do something space-efficient yet useful like FBreader).

Imprevist

I’m just going by a ton of videos I have seen on youtube. In every single video, the Kobo’s show lots of wasted space in comparison to Kindles and it drives me nuts. I really want one but I just can’t until that gets fixed. It defeats the purpose of having a larger eReader when your just going to waste all that space.

I can’t stand wasted space on an already small screen, either. Let’s see how my H2O fares… Alright this should reassure you. 🙂 This is a stock Aura H2O from 2014, with whatever 2-3 options I needed to recover my screen’s real estate. I use a fairly large font but you can still see that no pixel is wasted at all.

Imprevist

Thanks for the picture and clarification. However, now it seems it went from one extreme to the other and is crammed too tight with no breathing room. Any way to adjust that? Thanks for your time.

Oh yeah of course, margins and line spacing are sliders; I just happen to prefer the margin setting all the way to zero.

Imprevist

Got it. Viola… perhaps you should do a YouTube video explaining all of this in exact details like the way you have. All the videos I’ve seen seem to rush through the whole process without explaining it in full detail. Sure they talk about sliders and margin justification but they don’t actually implement it showing you step-by-step how each one looks. Thanks again.

Reader

Plus the glowlight [Plus] plus is really good/

That may be your experience, but that was not my experience. I purchased a Nook Glowlight Plus and returned it for the following reasons.
1) Background is too dark when the light is not turned on- definitely darker than the Nook Simple Touch background. Yes, the background is better when the light is turned on. A good background with the light turned on is irrelevant for me because I turn the light on as little as possible in order to save battery life. It is a lot less trouble and expense to replace a light bulb than an e-reader battery.
2) B&N got rid of thick, simple fonts- at least the thick, simple fonts I liked. I used Helvetica Nue font on the Nook Simple Touch. It may be that with a recent hack I would have been able to install a preferable font, but by the time I had found out about the hack, I had returned the Glowlight Plus. In any event, I doubt a hack could have done anything about the background.

I suspect that B&N didn’t do enough consumer testing.

I doubt I will purchase any e-readers next year, as I purchased 3 this year. The Kindle DX, courtesy of its 9.7″ screen, is the best I have seen for reading PDF docs. I wish the Kindle DX had more than one font. The Kindle Touch is a good basic e-reader- and I paid only $30 for it. I wish that it had the capability to turn the battery completely off. The Kobo Aura HD is OK. I especially like the option to thin or thicken fonts. Like others, I don’t like the wasted screen space- which can be eliminated but at the cost of also eliminating page numbers. You win some, you lose some.

AG

Actually the glowlight plus has a lighter shade of gray than the simple touch. The white bezel just causes an eye trick that makes it seem darker. I do think they should’ve made the bezel black to avoid this. Also I totally agree that they shouldn’t have gotten rid of the bolder fonts like Helvetia as those make it seem like higher contrast. I guess they stopped putting these fonts on some ereaders with higher pixel density because they only used the thicker fonts in the first place to compensate for the lower resolution. If they had thick fonts like that it would be more readable in lower light conditions but now they want to show that even with thin fonts letters can look crisp because of the high pixel density.

AG

It is grayer than the kindle paperwhite and voyage but not by much…Also I only paid thirty dollars for my glowlight plus so that might be adding some bias into my argument but I still don’t think it’s a bad ereader… It’s pretty good… I just say it’s not worse, only different, than other ereaders… It also has a whiter background than the kindle dx which has a shade of grey that when compared is grayer… This is more easily seen with the white versions… They’re all just good ereaders though… I wish barnesandnoble would make something more like their original nook though… It was so nice they should just make it lighter and thinner with a better screen.

Reader

Actually the glowlight plus has a lighter shade of gray than the simple
touch. The white bezel just causes an eye trick that makes it seem darker.
I didn’t realize that. Apparently B&N designers and testers didn’t think that customers would do an eye-to-eye comparison of the Glowlight Plus and the Simple Touch.

I do think they should’ve made the bezel black to avoid this.
Yes, indeed.

I get the impression that the B&N designers didn’t do much customer testing. They apparently got caught up in technical advances- higher resolution, thinner and lighter etc.- without testing these on prospective purchasers.

The Nook Simple Touch is/was a pretty good e-reader. I get the impression that B&N designers didn’t research sufficiently what customers liked about the Nook Simple Touch, and how they would react to changes in it.

If they had thick fonts like that it would be more readable in lower
light conditions but now they want to show that even with thin fonts
letters can look crisp because of the high pixel density.

Apparently they didn’t realize that some readers like those thick fonts- and also read in low light conditions. The only thick font in the Simple Touch that made it into the Glowlight Plus was Malabar. While that is thick enough for me, I don’t like all the extraneous squiggles on Malabar. I much prefer a plain, simple font.

If B&N, like Kobo, enabled users to change the thickness of the fonts, this objection of mine would have been irrelevant. I can’t see how adding that software would have been that costly.

It saddened me to return the Glowlight Plus, especially since I did it at a store. Every time I went to the store with a question about my Simple Touch, I was impressed at how knowledgeable and helpful B&N store personnel were.

Suz

I agree with you. i have the Voyage and the new Nook Glowlight Plus. I have experienced no lag and I find myself reading more on the Glow and then switching to the Ipad Kindle app to read a Kindle book. The no flash page turns on the Glow are great, where the Voyage flashes at each turn. The Glow is B&N’s best device to date and I wish people would give them a chance to get back solidly in the game. Yes, they have made some poor decisions, but give them a chance to realize they did and work to get it right. I am another one who wants them to survive. This site since I have started visiting it has alternately praised and trashed the Nook. I wish they would make up their mind and stick to one opinion.

Emanuel Hoogeveen

At least on my Kobo Aura (not H2O), there is a single margin slider in the font menu. I believe it only adjusts the horizontal margins, or perhaps it adjusts both simultaneously. However, with a bit of trial and error it is actually possible to adjust the vertical margins as well (but my current unpatched margins seem fine to me): http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3104415&postcount=10

AG

Exactly… But just so u know u can make the kindle not flash at every turn. Just go to settings and click on reading options then turn off the page refresh,

John Smith

You can easily add KoReader to your Aura and have any indentation/spacing that you want … together with a whole bunch of other stuff.

John Smith

:LoL. Barnes & Noble has lost two-thirds of its stock value since July 20. Companies can survive that kind of decline IF they’re in a strong market and there’s a hope of a turnaround B& N, though, is in a dying market of brick & mortar bookstores with not much hope of a turnaround so … it’s pretty much all over but the funeral for B&N. If they do survive, probably they’ll have to axe non-performing product lines to do it; one of which is their line of tablets & e-ink readers. Either way, the handwriting is on the wall and, if you buy one, you pretty much have to figure it’ll be orphaned within the year.

And, no, no amount of goodereader promotion is gonna change that.

AG

I know but that was partially directed towards everybody else too…and people thinking like that and not giving it a chance will cause it to die. Basically people don’t buy it because nobody else is buying it just because nobody else is buying it. The only thing that’s gonna bring its death is everybody’s unchanging bias against b&n. It doesn’t matter how good their devices are anymore….. Everybody is just so biased against it. Even if they do die it would be like the Sony ereaders. They were so good and after the company stopped making them they got transferred over to a different ebook store and still work. I just love Barnes and noble…. Though I must admit if all of them were replaced by Amazon bookstores I wouldn’t mind..,, it’s just…other than that all we have is books-a-million, which is terrible

Lisa Waugh

On the DX you can jailbreak it and install vlasosoft’s coolreader on it the load whatever font you like to it. You can also change the margins and line spacing as well as darken the fonts. It was really very easy to do.